Iran sent two monkeys into the space back in 2013. The first monkey (Aftab or Sun) was sent in January to an altitude of about 120km (75 miles) in a Pishgam rocket for a sub-orbital flight before returning intact to the Earth. The second monkey (Fargam or Auspicious) was sent in December as part of a programme aimed for manned space flight.

Now, head of the Aviation Research Centre at Iran’s Ministry of Science, Research and Technology, Fat’hollah Ami, says Iran’s space programme is going on smoothly and efforts are underway to send a manned spaceship into space within the next eight years.

He said the Aviation Research Centre is now focused on its main goal to send man into the space by the next eight years. “We have had serious negotiations with Russian space centres and they are expected to give us their final reply,” he said.

According to a Farsi report by the Arya News Agency, he elaborated on the aviation achievements of the Islamic Republic of Iran over the past years and said following their great achievement by launching the largest orbital carrier rocket into space, the Iranian researchers are now trying to launch new multistage orbital rockets.

“At present, 10 high-skilled Iranian pilots are taking special training courses. At the end of the day, we will pick up two of them for long-range flights into the space,” he said.

Iranian Space Monkeys Give Birth to Baby

Iranian Space Monkeys Give Birth to BabyThe two monkeys which were separately sent into the space and returned in perfect health to Earth by Iranian spaceships have given birth to a baby monkey last week.

In an address to a technology conference in northern Iran, Ami said ‘Aftab’ and ‘Fargam’ have given birth to a monkey baby.

He added the monkey baby was born last week, adding the researchers are now studying the effects of space travel on the new-born baby.

Iran has acquired the technology to produce nuclear batteries to be used in health and industrial sectors, an advisor to head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) says.

Asghar Zare'an, who is an advisor to Ali Akbar Salehi, said on Sunday that Iran was the fifth country mastering the technology to produce nuclear batteries after the United States, Russia, France and Britain.

He added that the technology could be used in producing cardiac pacemakers and laptops with additional applications in the oil sector and the relocation of satellites. The official expressed hope that the country would take further steps to develop and commercialize this technology by bolstering the relationship between knowledge-based companies and domestic industries.

The terms atomic battery, nuclear battery, tritium battery and radioisotope generator are used to describe a device which uses energy from the decay of a radioactive isotope to generate electricity. Like nuclear reactors, they generate electricity from atomic energy, but differ in that they do not use a chain reaction. Compared to other batteries they are very costly, but have an extremely long life and high energy density, and so they are mainly used as power sources for equipment that must operate unattended for long periods of time, such as spacecraft, pacemakers, underwater systems and automated scientific stations in remote parts of the world

RoboCup (Originally called as Robot World Cup Initiative) is an international research and education initiative. It is an attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem where wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined, as well as being used for integrated project-oriented education.

For this purpose, RoboCup chose to use soccer game as a primary domain, and organizes RoboCup: (originally called "The Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences", now called "RoboCup World Championship and Conference"). In order for a robot team to actually perform a soccer game, various technologies must be incorporated including: design principles of autonomous agents, multi-agent collaboration, strategy acquisition, real-time reasoning, robotics, and sensor-fusion. RoboCup is a task for a team of multiple fast-moving robots under a dynamic nvironment. RoboCup also offers a software platform for research on the software aspects of RoboCup. Iranian teams have been an active participant of RoboCup events since 1998. The number of Iranian teams has been largely increasing over the past years. Thereby, the need to have a regional event seemed rather necessary. Furthermore, since the overall number of world interested teams in RoboCup has increased; regional events may and can be a proper field for RoboCup leagues Technical Committees to observe teams qualities for RoboCup World Competitions qualifications. IranOpen is a place for teams willing to take part in RoboCup World Competitions in order to show their qualities and standards. It is also a place for fresh teams to gain experience and become ready to jointhe world class teams.

The first official RoboCup Open event in Iran was organized by Qazvin Azad University which was held at Tehran International Fair in April 07- 09, 2006. This event being the major Robotics event in Iral led to the formation of Iranian RoboCup National Committee in July 2006. RoboCup IranOpen 2006 hosted 116 teams from 5 countries within 7 leagues.

The two VVER-1000 units will be built with Generation III+ technology, including the latest safety features, and have a combined capacity of 2100 MWe, ASE has said. During the ceremony held on 10 September, the two sides signed a protocol on the start of work on the project to build units 2 and 3, known as Bushehr II.

Bushehr units 2 and 3 are to be completed in 2024 and 2026, respectively.

ORNL's neutron source gets an upgrade, thanks to heavy water bought from Iran

Experiments are on hold at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Spallation Neutron Source as crews replace the facility's inner reflector plug with a new one, filled with six metric tons of heavy water purchased from Iran.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a dramatic speech to the world on Monday evening in an attempt to prevent Iran from overtaking Israel in the nuclear arms race. But in one area Iran has already passed Israel – and by a big margin: Over the past two decades, Iran has been making great efforts to become a scientific superpower and its research and development productivity has risen by exponentially, leaving Israel far behind in measures of production of scientific research.

Twenty years ago Israel was the clear leader in scientific research in the Middle East, and one of the world leaders too, in terms of the volume of scientific research. Since then it has fallen to fourth place in the Middle East, after Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Iran now leads in the number of scientific articles in many fields, such as physics, biology, chemistry and business administration. In the humanities, culture and art, Israel still maintains the top spot. In economic research, Israel has fallen behind Iran and Saudi Arabia too.

The data is also not adjusted for population. This means Iran, with a population of 80 million people, produces more such research than Israel, with less than 9 million people. Regardless, in the past Israel still produced more scientific research in total than these other countries. In 1996, Iranians published only 960 scientific articles compared to about 10,000 by Israelis. Since then, the Iranian figures have climbed to some 41,000 a year, though per capita Israel still publishes more scientific articles than the other countries.

Turkey overtook Israel in the volume rankings back in 2003, and Iran in 2008, while in 2015 Saudi Arabia passed Israel.

The rise of Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia in such rankings reflects enormous government spending on such research as a matter of policy, not just to improve research but also to produce a more educated and skilled labor force.